


the sight of bridges

by eudaimon



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: M/M, beloved childhood toys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-18
Updated: 2013-05-18
Packaged: 2017-12-12 05:57:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/808086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eudaimon/pseuds/eudaimon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once upon a time, I gave Chekov a three-legged soft toy rhino named Tolstoy.  It was a throw-away detail in a story, which was fine but, since then, he's turned up in every Chekov/Sulu story that I've written so far.  This is an epic love story (if a rhino can be said to understand the idea of 'epic').</p>
            </blockquote>





	the sight of bridges

Once there was a woman and he loved her. Time is both complicated and relative, and she was not always a woman; once, she was the girl who held him tightly in her arms after her _Papa_ bought him for her on a trip to London. She held him tightly and she wrote her name on his label lest he be lost.

 _M A R T A_ , she wrote. Marta.   
And he was Tolstoy. And they were together.

His girl was a beautiful girl. Green-eyed and dark haired. She carried him under her arm everywhere she went. She was quiet at parties. As she grew, she stayed quiet. His girl was a beautiful girl. 

His girl was a runner.

He came to know the world as his girl knew the world. She liked to run along the bank of the river, the Neva, in the evening when the lights were coming on, glowing in green reflection in the dark water. She ran with her head down and her sleeves pushed up over her. Her heart would speed up to keep pace with her as her feet pounded on the concrete. Often, she ran in the rain, the fine, misting rain that fell in the city in the late spring and her hair hung in her eyes and the stone caught the light just so. She ran with long graceful strides and sometimes it seemed that she spent more time over the ground than on it. 

One night, a thing happened to his running girl. It happened on the _Troitskiy_ bridge and the lights were all on so it was like she was running suspended between the Neva and the sky, dark on dark, and the lights forever. It was Marta’s favourite bridge across the river, very beautiful and wide enough to test her. She pushed herself hard, kept a tough pace. 

But on the one night…

There was a table on the bridge and she had to stop running. He was in her way. He was skinny and handsome, this boy, with curly hair and kind eyes. She shouted at him and he moved the table and she went on her way and came home and told Tolstoy about it.

It was just like that. That was exactly how it happened.

That skinny boy was waiting for her on the bridge every night for a month. Sometimes, she shouted at him, sometimes she didn’t and then, one night, when she came to him on the bridge, she didn’t leave him.

And then there were three of them: Marta, Andrei and Tolstoy. At her wedding, Marta wore her mother’s wedding dress and tiny white flowers in her hair and they went skating on the Neva. They went dancing on the ice and then, that night, she reached down and sat Tolstoy under the bed.

He liked the way that Andrei made her laugh before he made her sigh.

Tolstoy and Marta would spend long days in the window seat, while her belly swelled and Andrei made chairs, made tables, made a ring of heartwood that Marta wore on her right hand, enamel and gold on her left. He would feel the baby kick against him and Marta would cradle him against her breast and practice the names that she would give to sons and daughters.

Pavel. She named him Pavel, which means “small”, and he was so tiny when Marta laid Tolstoy in the crib beside him.

And there was a boy, then, and Tolstoy loved him. There were more babies, yes, and Tolstoy loved them all, because they were Marta’s, and they had the same eyes as his running girl, but Pavel was special. Pavel was his, the way Marta had been before she was Andrei’s. M-A-R-T-A on his label, but it was Pavel who carried him, and Pavel who loved him, and, when the dog tore his leg away, it was Pavel who held him and wept and wouldn’t let Andrei stitch him for a long time.

It was a pain that Tolstoy bore bravely, cradled against his dear boy’s bird-boned chest, just like, years later, Tolstoy would watch his boy bear pain bravely, bloody hole burned into yellow shirt. There was another handsome boy, met on another sort of bridge and he fussed and fretted and, when Tolstoy’s boy was strong enough to run again, this handsome boy kept count for him.

Tolstoy had room in his heart for another boy.

The distances were very long and Pavel broke it into laps, and then there were the times when they were all together in a little room, Pavel and Tolstoy and the other boy, this Hikaru who loved Pavel like Andrei had loved Marta, and Tolstoy could make allowances for that kind of love, and he hoped that they had longer than Marta and Andrei, Pavel and his boy.

One night, they were together in the little room, Pavel stretched out on the bed reading and the boy watering plants, and then he wiped his hand on his leg and he reached out and he picked Tolstoy up. He touched the label where M A R T A was still written. He rubbed his fingers against the scar where Tolstoy’s leg at once been. He had kind, soft hands, callused at the fingertips from the things that he did day after day with such care.

“What happened to his arm?” he asked, and Pavel smiled, and he looked so much like his father, like Andrei, and he looked so much like Tolstoy’s running girl.

Love, such love.

“A dog,” says Pavel, rolling onto his side and holding out his hand until the boy comes to him, slides onto the bed with him. “I love him, even though he is imperfect.”

When he says that, he rubs his thumb over a graze on the boy’s face and gets a bitten finger for his trouble. They kissed and then Pavel shifted on his back and he reached down and put Tolstoy under the bed.

He lay there listening, to the ship, to the hum of space beyond it and to the way that the boy made Pavel laugh before he made him sigh.


End file.
